Recettes

Ayamase Sauce

Ayamase is the green pepper stew of southwestern Nigeria, known widely as designer stew, and it is the sibling of ofada stew rather than a version of it. The difference is the pepper: ofada uses red bell peppers and tomatoes and comes out red; ayamase uses green bell peppers and unripe scotch bonnets and comes out dark green. Bleached palm oil is what defines the technique. The oil is heated until it stops being red and turns clear, which changes its flavour entirely, removing the sweetness and leaving something deeper and more savoury. It is a step that fills a kitchen with smoke and it cannot be skipped without producing a different sauce. The rest is southwestern Nigerian cooking at full strength: locust beans for fermented depth, ground crayfish, assorted meat including tripe and cow skin, and whole hard eggs that sit in the sauce and take on its flavour. The sign that it is finished is the oil floating to the surface. It is served with ofada rice, the local short-grain rice, or with white rice or rice and beans, and it appears at parties and in restaurants as much as at home.

50 minMediumNigeria

Recette de Cook with Sandy · Africook

Beans Porridge

Beans porridge is one of the most-eaten dishes in Nigerian homes: beans cooked soft, then finished in a palm oil base with blended pepper, smoked fish, crayfish and ugwu. It is weekday food, made in quantity, and it is as likely to appear at breakfast as at dinner. The palm oil base is what separates it from plain cooked beans. Onion is softened in the oil, blended tomato and pepper go in and are cooked until the oil separates out, and only then do the beans join. That separation is the marker Nigerian cooks watch for: it means the raw tomato has cooked off and the base is ready. Ugwu, the fluted pumpkin leaf, goes in at the end and needs only a few minutes to wilt. It is one of the most widely used greens in southern Nigeria and gives the dish its colour and a mild, slightly nutty flavour. Fried ripe plantain is the standard partner, and the sweetness against the savoury beans is why that pairing has stuck. Yam and rice also work. Despite the beans and vegetables, this is not a vegetarian dish as written: the crayfish and smoked fish are doing much of the seasoning.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

1 hr 10 minEasyNigeria

Recette de Sobecooks · Africook

Yamarita

Yamarita is yam in an egg and flour coating, fried until the crust is crisp and the inside stays soft. It is a Nigerian treatment of the country's most important tuber, and it is straightforwardly a modern dish rather than an inherited one. The name gives away its logic. Yamarita is yam plus the ending of dundun ata or, by the more commonly repeated account, a play on the Yoruba way of naming a fried thing. Whatever the derivation, it belongs to the same family of inventions as yam chips and yam balls: ways of turning a starch that is usually eaten soft into something you can pick up with your fingers at a party. It sits alongside the older Nigerian yam preparations rather than replacing them. Pounded yam is ceremonial, yam porridge is domestic, yam with egg sauce is breakfast, and yamarita is what appears on a small chops platter next to puff puff and spring rolls. That is a real position in Nigerian eating even if it is a recent one, and the dish has spread well beyond the households that first made it.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

1 hr 5 minEasyNigeria

Recette de Laila · Africook

Dambu Nama (Shredded Meat)

Dambu nama is dried, shredded and fried beef from Northern Nigeria, fine and fibrous, closer to floss than to jerky. It is popular among the Hausa and Fulani, and its name is straightforward Hausa: dambu for the shredded form, nama for meat. It began as preservation. Fresh meat was scarce in the dry season, and drying beef in the sun and then pounding or shredding it into fine strands made it keep, made it light to carry, and concentrated it. Spices were added over time, which improved the flavour and did further preservative work. That the result is now eaten as a snack rather than as a store against a hard season is the usual arc for a preserved food that turned out to be good. Its texture is what makes it distinctive. Where kilishi, its northern neighbour in the dried meat category, stays as thin sheets, dambu nama is broken down into fine fibres, which changes entirely how it is eaten. It is taken by the pinch or the spoonful, scattered over rice or eaten straight, and it holds for a long time in a sealed container. It is also frequently sold ready made, since the drying and shredding are the slow parts.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

50 minMediumNigeria

Recette de Laila · Africook